Slicethepie Goes Beyond <cite>American Idol</cite>, Might Save Labels

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Slicethepie Goes Beyond <cite>American Idol</cite>, Might Save Labels

Ask any music biz insider why record labels deserve such a big cut when their artists make it big, and they'll give you the same answer: Only about one in every 20 of the bands they sign breaks even on its advance.

Compare that to the winners and near-winners of the hit Fox network TV show, American Idol, which makes money hand over fist by letting the audience select a pop star who then, more often than not, goes on to make the label even more money.

Never mind file sharing and declining CD sales: The most broken part of the music business machine could be "artist and repertoire" (A&R), the part that determines which bands get signed, which songs get released and which one is the single. An admitted 5 percent success rate leaves clear room for improvement.

Slicethepie is attempting to improve on that equation by seeking the wisdom of the music crowd on the internet the way Idol does it on TV. The initiative, SoundOut, scheduled to launch Wednesday morning, will let labels audition rough demos anonymously within the system in order to determine what the public will like. If the band resonates, the label has invaluable market intel. If doesn't, the label is out maybe 50 bucks.

"The way it works now is that the A&R department establish between themselves which artists they're interested in," Slicethepie founder David Courtier-Dutton said in a telephone interview. "Once they've spent a couple hundred thousand pounds [recording the album] ... they run them out to market research companies and pay a thousand dollars a track to get some focus-group feedback."

Even analysis tools that measure file sharing, blogging and streaming take place after substantial investment has already been made. "It's a bit late by then," he said.

SoundOut lets labels upload a song into the system for $20 to $50 in exchange for a detailed report, viewable 24 hours later (screenshots are from the 19-page sample .pdf), which indicates whether a song caught on with listeners and if so, which markets the band or label may want to target. Promisingly, Courtier-Dutton said, multiple tests have shown Slicethepie's system to be consistent. If you run the same song through the service, he said, it generates ratings within 5 percent percent of each other.

Tim Clark of ie music, which manages Robbie Williams and Sia, has been testing SoundOut in advance of its Wednesday launch. "SoundOut is a highly innovative and cost-effective tool that will help managers and labels gauge the market potential for an artist, get an objective view on which tracks work with which audience, and establish what a broad cross-section of potential fans think of a particular track," said Clark.

Slicethepie has experience in this area. It already runs a healthy crowdsourced music-financing site that has given 22 bands $30,000 each to record new albums while letting users earn investment credits and build reputation by rating and reviewing music accurately. And if they invest in an album that makes money, they earn a return on that investment.

No major label has committed to use Slicethepie's SoundOut program yet, but TuneCore, which has distributed over 400,000 songs to iTunes and other online outlets and paid out over $10 million to its artists, plans to offer SoundOut to its users. Artists will have the option to invest TuneCore revenue in a SoundOut test without dealing with the withdrawal process. If you only made $50 from TuneCore last year, the thinking may go, maybe that money would be best spent on a SoundOut test of some new material.

"It's a very cool and elegant technology but more importantly, it's also a very useful service," stated Jeff Price, former spinART label owner and founder of TuneCore. "I have seen a few ideas approximating this concept, but never pulled together the way Slicethepie has done it."

Record labels desperate to cut costs while still signing the occasional new artist have ample reason to try Slicethepie's SoundOut service. Whatever's left of their A&R departments can almost certainly use the help. And if they need further evidence that A&R can be crowdsourced, they need look no further than American Idol. By listening to the crowd before investing, American Idol creator Simon Fuller has consistently outperformed "experts" who rely solely on their own ears.